Show Notes:

Anonymous claims it will start releasing details about journalists, taxi drivers, police officers and government officials who are on the Cartel’s payroll, if the kidnap victim is not released by November 5th (Guy Fawkes Day)

No information about the person who was allegedly kidnapped has been released

Anonymous hopes that releasing this information, the government will be able to pursue the allegedly corrupt officials. However, depending on the type of information, it is unlikely that the evidence provided would be enough to convict someone.

There are serious concerns that the release or even the threat of the release of such information could result in a violent backlash from the Cartel.

It would seem that anyone who’s name appears on the lists released by anonymous would be in serious danger. A case of mistaken identity or speculation could result in the death of an innocent person.

Anonymous has claimed it would attack a number of entities, including the NYSE and Facebook, a large number of these attacks have never taken place, or were unsuccessful and never mentioned again.

At least 50 different companies were targeted by attackers attempting to steal research and development documents and other sensitive information.

The attacks started in July, and continued through September, it is also believed that the same attackers were targeting NGOs and the auto industry earlier this year.

The attacks where spear phishing attacks, a specialized form of the common email attack. Unlike a typical phishing scam, where an attacker poses as your bank and attempts to get you to enter your login credentials and other personal information in to a fake site designed to mimic the look of your banks site, a spear phishing attack specifically targets individuals, using information that is known about them and where they work. Spear Phishing attacks also commonly involve impersonating someone you might expect to receive such an email from.

The emails sent in this case often took the form of meeting invitations with infected attachments. In other cases when the messages were broadcast to many victims, they took the form of security bulletins, usually riding on actual vulnerability announcements for common software such as Adobe Reader and Flash Player. It also seems the attackers attached the infected files in 7Zip format, to evade many spam filters and virus scanners that block or scan .zip files. The attackers also took to encrypting the zip files with a password, and providing that password in the email, again to avoid virus scanners on the inbound mail servers.

This attackers used PoisonIvy, a common backdoor trojan written by one or more persons who speak Mandarin. The Trojan also contained the address of a Command and Control (C&C) server used to feed it additional instructions.

Once the attackers made their way in to the network through one or more infected machines, they leveraged that access to eventually gain permissions to copy sensitive documents and upload them to an external server where they could then be recovered.

One of the command and control servers was a VPS operated in the United States, owned by a Chinese individual from Hebei province. Investigators have not been able to determine if this individual was part of the attacks, if anyone else had access to the VPS, or if he was acting on behalf of another group. It is possible the server was compromised, or that it could have been made to look like that was the case.

Symantec says that there were a number of different groups attacking these companies during this time span, some using a custom developed backdoor called ‘Sogu’ and using specially crafted .doc and .pdf files. There is no word on if these additional attacks were also successful.

Feedback:

Q: I have a question regarding downloads, in particular, remote downloads.

A: There are a number of options, ranging in capability and ease of use.

rTorrent – A command line torrent client, works great over SSH (especially when combined with Screen). This is what Allan uses to seed the Linux Action Show torrents.

uTorrent – uTorrent (microTorrent) is available for windows, mac and linux. It offers an optional web UI (the web UI is the only option for linux) for remotely controlling the torrents, and can also automatically start downloading torrents when they are placed in a specified directory. uTorrent also incorporates an RSS reader.

curl – A library and utility for dealing with http, it is a common feature of most web hosting servers, and easily integrates with PHP. You could write a short PHP script that would download files to the report server when prompted (possibly by an email or access from your mobile phone)

Attacks that crippled South Korean (Republic of Korea) government websites in July 2009 and again in March 2011 might have been cyber warfare drills conducted by North Korea (Democratic People’s Republic of Korea)

Attacks were likely reconnaissance to start building a detailed plan of attack in the event of war.

Much of the attack came from within South Korea, it is speculated that the virus was left on a number of South Korean file sharing sites, and then the resulting botnet of infected computers was used to take down the government websites.

Attacks on Media:

The Washington Post claims that no passwords or other personal information were stolen (were the passwords just hashed, and therefore ‘not disclosed’, or did the attackers not gain access to the passwords?)

By reverse engineering a crashed EP-3E Aries II reconnaissance plane, the Chinese were able to begin intercepting encrypted US Navy communications

A few weeks after President Obama’s election, the Chinese flooded communications links they knew were monitored by the NSA with unencrypted copies of intercepted communications, proving they had compromised American communications links.

The attacks on RSA earlier this year were not conclusively linked to Cyber Warfare, they could have been the work of a lone hacker, a small group, or an organized government

The RSA hack later led to the compromise of secure systems at Lockheed Martin and other US arms manufacturers.

Earlier this year we also saw the compromise of a large number of email accounts belonging to government and military officials. This type of reconnaissance can be used to gather information that would allow attackers to break in to more secured systems over time.

Many attacks go unnoticed, as the perpetrators keep the systems just to be used to launch future attacks from. As we saw in the RSA hack, the attackers used an offsite webserver they had compromised earlier to send the data to, to avoid connecting directly to RSA and possibly leaving a trail. They then destroyed the webserver, breaking the link back to them

In the past was have discussed the similar tactic of Island hopping, compromising an outward facing system such as a web, mail or monitoring server, or the desktop of a secretary or other lower level employee, and then slowly gathering more and more information in order to compromise the true targets of the attack.

In the first of a 3-week long series of events, the STOked boys are taking you on an in-depth tour of the Borg Special Task Force missions. Up this week is a guide to “The Infected” which includes tips and tricks for painlessly eliminating the Borg drones, and their leaders.

Before we dig into that however, BIG NEWS landed this week regarding the impending purchase of Cryptic Studios by Perfect World International. Despite the community’s uproar over this news, we’re taking a more level-headed approach to the corporate nature of this acquisition, and intend to share our thoughts on why this could be one of the best business moves STO could potentially see.

General Tips:
- If you’re new, get experienced players to lead you through. There’s plenty out there now.
- Voice chat is highly recommended. (Vivox coming soon!)
- Follow directions. Or if you’re leading, give clear directions that are easy to follow!
- Do not progress any dialog pop-ups until the Team Leader gives the OK, or does it him/herself.
- Do not go in unprepared! Make sure you have a solid spec that plays to the specific strengths of both your Space AND Ground abilities.

SPACE:
Zip around BEHIND the gate, and do not activate the two popups until the team is in position.
With high DPS, you may be able to destroy the gate in a single activation sequence.
If you destroy the gate without killing transmitters, you get better loot.
If you do not destroy the gate in a single activation, you will be faced with 3-4 waves of borg ships that get progressively more and more powerful with each wave.

Good Space Boff Abilities:
Hazard Emitters (practically a must-have)
Tactical Team
A lot of DPS/buffs/debuffs
Gravity Well — good for chain reactions on warp cores!

Tactical Cubes have a ~5km explosion radius. If you are trying to keep the Transmitters alive, and have a Tac Cube spawned, be sure to lure it away from them before destroying the cube.

Ground Kits:
Engineer: Fabrication or Bunker Kit
Tactical: Fire Team or Squad Leader
Science: Medic (at least one on the team)… if you want to DPS, I recommend Geophysicist

Order of Ground Targets:
Interlink Node
Infected
Drone
Medical
(Protos? Can be cleaned up at any time after Medical. May despawn on their own.)
AFTER ONLY TACTICALS ARE LEFT, SWITCH TO MELEE WEAPON
Tactical
Heavy
Elite

FIRST BOSS: Ogen
Pull him OUT of his room, into the hallway.
He will stop and summon friends halfway through the fight. If you are in the hallway, they will not join the battle.

END BOSS: Manus
Get into the alcoves on the wall opposite from the entry doorway.
This blocks line of sight between group members (meaning, no heals!), which prevents her “chain lightning” attack from hitting more than one target at a time.

NEXT WEEK: “The Cure”
Keep your tips/guides coming! Jeremy is gonna try and post the best ones over at JupiterColony.com